Home Marketing Site Audit for High Search Engine Rankings 2020

Site Audit for High Search Engine Rankings 2020

There a matrix called the SEO Health Score to measure the technical aspects and the user-experience of a website for search engine optimization. The site audit is a checklist to improve the SEO health score of a website.

If you are an SEO expert you need to follow a checklist to keep your website in good health. You need to check all the boxes of this checklist. This site audit checklist assures that you have followed the search engine guidelines and your site is ready for any search engine update.

Site Audit for High Search Engine Rankings 2020

You put a lot of time, money and effort into developing a website. Even after putting months of effort, you sometimes find that your website is not getting as much traffic as expected. You feel frustrated about why your site is behind your competitor’s website. The answer to all your questions is the SEO site audit.

Table of content

  1. What is a Site Audit?
  2. Why site audit is important
  3. Preferred Domain
  4. Using SSL Certification
  5. Google index status
  6. Conclusion
  7. FAQ
Site Audit for High Search Engine Rankings

What is a Site Audit?


SEO Audit is a test that grades how well a website will perform in search engine results. SEO audit will have a set of tests and on each step, a test is performed. You need to diagnose the issues and have to fix to improve the site health.

You can take this as a report card of your kid, where there is grading for each aspect like studies, co-curriculum, cleanliness, and discipline. The same kind of grading search engines gives to your site for user experience, user interface, website speed, etc. We can improve the grading by working on each and every aspect separately.

Why SEO Audit is Important?

Site Audit for High Search Engine Rankings 2020


Like any other audit, the SEO audit is necessary and important. You conduct an audit to know the weaknesses in working and want to perform the tasks as per protocol. The SEO audit is not an exception here.

With the evolution in search engine algorithms, SEO has become even more complex. The search engine checks your website at several levels. Now it is not putting the keywords at correct places, but other aspects like technical aspects and quantity of content are equally important. SEO audit helps you find the weaknesses of your website and you need to fix those weaknesses.

As a protocol, you need to follow and perform site audits as per the given checklist. The main aspects of the checklist are as below:

Preferred Domain


The search engine loves unique content. You need to make sure that your site runs on a single version. There are several ways to access your website. E.g

http://yoursite.comhttp://www.yoursite.comwww.yoursite.comyousite.com

You should plan and select your preferred domain and your website should be accessible to that particular version only.

Using SSL Certification


Using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification keeps your website secure. It helps to build trust with users and search engines. SSL is an encryption-based internet security protocol. It ensures privacy and data integrity in internet communication. ‘Let’s encrypt’ offer free SSL certification for your website.

Google Index Status

Site Audit for High Search Engine Rankings 2020


Next thing you should check the Google Index Status or the search engine index status. If your site is not index in Google then you will get the ZERO traffic.

Google indexing means the Google crawler has visited your website and store your web content in its database. Next time when a user sends a Google query, the search engine will fetch records related to the user’s query. Your site will be in the search results only if Google has store your website’s information.

You can check the index status of your website in Google Search Console. If you don’t have any knowledge about this tool, you don’t need to worry. There is an alternate way to check the index status.

Open google.com in your browser. In the search bar type ‘site:yoursite.com’ and press search. It will show all the indexed pages of your website. If you get ‘no result’ then your site has not indexed yet and you need to fix this issue on a high priority basis.

Check the Google Rank for your brand name


Go to Google.com and search for your brand name. Your website should be on position one with this search query.

E.g if your website is kitchenappliances.com then make search query as kitchen appliances. If kitchenappliances.com is not at position one then Google may have imposed some penalty on your website.

In such a scenario you need to sign in Google Search Console and check the site inspection. You will get the suggestion to fix such an issue in the search console.

Check the on-page SEO


On-page SEO is the main factor for search engine rankings. You need to make sure that you have done everything right with respect to on-page SEO.

Most people do mistakes in writing the title of the page. The title of the page must have the main keyword of your web content and that keyword should have a good amount of volume & low competition. The length of the title should not exceed the limit prescribed by the search engines. When you search your page in google, the title should not be truncated in the search results.

The next thing you need to check is the Meta description of your webpage. Before that, you must understand that the Meta description does not directly influence your search engine ranking. It helps you to increase your click-through rate (CTR).

Now come to the header tag. Make sure you are using only one H1 tag that too is at the top of your content and sub-heading should follow the H1 tag.

Check for content plagiarism


In the past, you can copy any content from anywhere and use the same to your website. But it is not the case now. Google hates duplicate content. If you are copying content on several sections of your website but if you are copying content from other websites or source then it is even worse.

At present content is the king. If you can write the quality content, then nobody can stop you from getting rank in search engines. Google wants to serve the best answer to its user and it is not ready to make any compromise in this. Try to make your content the best and unique in the industry and your ranking will grow automatically.

Check website load speed


It has been mentioned earlier that Google wants its users to deliver the best result and top quality experience. You need to understand why Google has such an approach for its users.

Google has Adwords as its main income source. Businesses pay Google because it has the best search engine. People trust Google search results. Now for one second, imagine if Google loses its trust. Then the user will no longer search his question on Google and definitely will fetch some other sources. In such a scenario, Google will lose all its Adwords business.

The new web content is publishing every second. Google has no problem with getting web content. Today, the user has no time and patience. He just wants his answer in seconds. If your site is taking a lot of time in loading, then it’s a big red flag for Google as the user is not ready to wait. It is recommended that your site should load at the lightening speed to get high ranks in search engines.

Check the broken links

Site Audit for High Search Engine Rankings 2020


A broken link or page is another factor of user experience (UX). Just think, you visited a website that has good web content and visuals. While reading the content, you find a point that makes you curious. The website has given a link to read further. Just as you click on that link, it shows 404 error which means the not data available or in simple words that link is broken. What will be the state of your mind? You will be frustrated, right.

This will happen to every user. Google takes these broken links very seriously. If your website has some broken links, you should find and fix those broken links on priority.

Also read

Conclusion


I hope you should have found the things that can improve your search engine rankings. To run a thorough SEO audit may take up to a few days depending upon the size of your website. But before running the SEO campaign you need to do the SEO audit for the best results. The site audit is a continuous process and you need to conduct the site audit at frequent intervals. If you have a small to the medium-sized website then you can run the site audit once every month and if you have a large-sized website then it is recommended to conduct site audit once in two to three months.

Write down in comments section what is the size of your website is and frequently you conducting the site audit.

FAQ

1. Do I need the expertise to perform a site audit?

Actually, site audit is not simple and it needs fair amount of web development knowledge and skill. If you are a web developer you then you should not have problem in fixing the issue. But if you are the SEO expert, you need to transfer the issue to your web developer and let him handle all the technical stuff. Without the proper knowledge or skill, you should not try to fix the core structure of your website.

2. Do I penalize if some else has copied content from my website?

answer to this question let me ask a counter-question. Whose content has indexed first? If it yours then you have no problem at all with copied content. But if he is forcing google to index his content first (which is a rare scenario), then you may have problems. It is recommended to send an index request through Google Search Console to index your content faster than anyone else.

3. why do an seo audit?

Like any other audit, the SEO audit is necessary and important. You conduct an audit to know the weaknesses in working and want to perform the tasks as per protocol. The SEO audit is not an exception here.

4. what is seo audit?

SEO audit is the process of analyzing how well your web presence relates to best practices

5. What is a SEO audit report?

It’s a report which includes issues & recommendations on all the elements of SEO known till date over your Website. Whereas, there are SEO Tools such as SEOQuake, META SEO Inspector, SEMRush, MOZ-OSE, Ahrefs, which can generate the Audit Report for any Website.

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